More Level Updates
This week was a continuation of the last in that my sole focus lied with trying to get the final level to a state of being presentable and playable. As mentioned in the last post, I was wanting to make the lift functional and operable by the sequential button presses in the three rooms. The first step was implementing an animation for the ‘lift’ and ‘lift mechanism’. Seeing as it is merely a case of changing rotation and position on an object, it only required creating a keyframe animation in timeline: “In the Timeline window, you can easily record animations and set keyframes. You do this with what’s called an Infinite clip. An Infinite clip is a clip that contains basic keyframe animation recorded through the Timeline Editor window. When you wish to make a simple, basic animation of an object within your scene, changing its position, size, or simply rotating it can all be done easily through the Timeline Editor window using keyframe animation. Keyframe animation records the state of the object and then interpolates between the changes of each keyframe. This ends up being a useful tool for quickly making animations without having to import a custom animation clip or open the Unity Animation Editor window.” (Creating Keyframed Animation in Timeline – Unity Learn, 2021)
Because we want our animation to be triggered by a script, we need to add an animator component to the object in question. The ‘controller’ in the inspector will be set to ‘Lift’.
Creating an animation in the timeline is fairly straight forward and does not take too much time to figure out. After hitting ‘create’ you will add (+) an Animation Track in which you will select the ‘Lift (Animator)’. Once you want to begin recording you will position the Playhead where you want the first keyframe of your animation to be. Right click the row of Transform in the Inspector of which you wish to animate and then hit record. Click ‘add key’ to add a keyframe at the first instance of animation – this will log information highlighted in the Transform section of the Inspector. Then to set a duration, move the Playhead along to your desired amount of seconds or frames, and in this case, simply change the positioning to its end position. This will add another keyframe with the new information from the inspector. You can then play the animation back to see if it works as intended.
Finally turn off ‘play on awake’ in the inspector so that it can be activated by a trigger script rather than activating immediately upon testing.
Exactly the same was done for the ‘lift mechanism’, although rotation was changed rather than position in the Transform section in the Inspector. You can simply position, rotate, or scale the object in the scene view if preferred.
To make these operable by the player, it is a case of setting up a trigger script that allows for sequential button presses; Georgi is setting this up in the meantime. This gave me some time to figure out how I could incorporate the cloud ability into the lower section (deep pool) of the level.
If water was to be locked away behind another, more difficult sequential puzzle, it could then be released, and it could pour into a room. The water could act as a sort of weight which then triggers the opening of a hatch/ door, unlocking the next area. However, to stick with the fantasy aspect of the game, the water should be toxic so that the player must change it into cloud (like holy water for the devil if you like). Once the water is changed into cloud, you have only a short time to get through before the hatch/ door closes again and you are killed. I know that both Luke and Georgi are not too fond of the idea of implementing running water so I would have to think of a way around this so that this feature can be added. Maybe it is possible to fill the room with water rather than having it poured in? By doing this, the ‘water’ simply, becomes an object with a water material or something similar and can be animated to ascend through the floor to imitate a pool, this would work in the same way that the lift will be triggered to animate at the top tier of the level. I suggested this alternative method from the moment I mentioned my idea and it was most certainly favoured by the team.
More to come!
References
2021. Unity. San Francisco: Unity Technologies
Unity Learn. 2021. Creating Keyframed Animation in Timeline - Unity Learn. [online] Available at: <https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/creating-keyframed-animation-in-timeline-2019-3> [Accessed 21 August 2021].